[dmayle]

This is one of the hot button topics, but I was surprised to see the (false) reference to the FAA having race and gender quotas.

This was suggested to me six months ago by someone who was extreme right wing, (going as far as to say that the FAA only hired non-white employees) and I found the claims bizarre enough to research on my own. They claimed that this was a known fact, whether you read left or right news sources, but when I did my research (not on bias, but on actual hiring results), it said that historically, the FAA has been about 90% white, and currently is about 70% white (IIRC), which is a far cry from suggesting that the FAA has race and gender quotas.

Again, here, the article makes the same claim, but this time with a citation (!), so I wondered if there was some truth to it, that I missed, earlier, but again, the truth does not pan out. It seems that a few members of the NBCFAE (National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) stepped over the line in their attempts to to change hiring practices that were preventing black candidates from being considered (going from increasing the diversity of the candidate pool, which is laudable, to discriminating in order to change up the racial mix, which is illegal).

However, in all of this, it's not the FAA acting, just a few powerful individuals from the NBCFAE. That doesn't change the fact that something bad happened, just the characterization of it ends up being completely misleading.